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Betty Hatch
Presentation to the SB Council for Self-Esteem - 09/24/10
The following synopsis of the day’s event is by an audience member.
Bob Hodges Introduced
our Presenter
“Our speaker today is Betty Hatch, the founder, and still active member, of the Santa Barbara Council for Self-Esteem.
“Betty started her life adventure in Jackson, Mississippi and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Alabama. She arrived in Santa Barbara in 1962, where she created and managed a successful business: LA BELLE, Model/Talent Agency & Professional Training School, headquartered in historic El Paseo, in downtown Santa Barbara. Several generations of Santa Barbara’s youth benefited from her training. She had professional models working all over the world and, for a time, served as President of the International Modeling and Talent Association.
“She has been happily married to her soul mate, Stan Hatch, for 28 years and counting, who has prepared a power point presentation that will accompany our speaker.
“She has been and is currently an active member of a long list of organizations in Santa Barbara. She founded the Santa Barbara County Film Council and Leadership Santa Barbara County, both of which are still thriving after 20 years. As a businesswoman, Betty served as President of the Santa Barbara Region Chamber of Commerce on whose board she sat for 13 years, and was on the Board of Cottage Hospital for 10 years as well as on the Boards of City Commerce Bank and MidState Bank.
“Betty founded the Santa Barbara Council for Self-Esteem in 1989. She went on to become the President of the National Association for Self-Esteem in 1992 and ‘93. Today marks 21 years of providing free public presentations with the purpose of elevating the level of Self-Esteem in our community.
“Now Betty presents to us for the first time. She will talk about self-esteem and how it has been a significant part of her personal and professional life.
“Please give a warm welcome to our founder, Betty Hatch.”
The woman who stood before us was petite, stylish, and self-confident with a big smile and a luxurious head of grey curls. In that all speakers for the Counsel are asked to answer three questions, she made an initial point of stating 1) Where she feels her self esteem comes from: “The thoughts I think, the decisions and judgments I make about myself, the love and traits which I adopted from my parents, my life experiences, the risks I have taken, the mistakes I have made and the accomplishments I have achieved; 2) I lose my self-esteem,” she added, “when I fail at something I want to do, be or have; and, 3) I regain my self-esteem when I learn from the experience.”
Since one’s parents are so important in a child’s early self-esteem, Betty began by describing her parents. Betty’s mother wanted her to be like she was, someone who cooked, gardened and played bridge. But the decisions Betty made resulted in her doing none of these things and this was hard on her mother.
Her father tap danced on the street corners and shined shoes to earn his way so he could stay in school, and off the farm. He became, over the years, a professional dancer, a pilot and an entrepreneur. Betty respected his fairness. He did as he promised. He assured Betty she could be, do or have whatever she wanted in life, which certainly enhanced her self-esteem.
Betty is an only child and said her challenges are: she is dyslexic; very emotional; slow and methodical, a workaholic and a perfectionist. She then described her most life-changing events and the decisions affecting her life and her self-esteem, which she made after each.
At 4 her mother told her she could not help in the kitchen, that she would break something. Betty begged until her mother relented. Then, as her mother had predicted, she broke a glass. The result was she never again liked being in a kitchen, hated to cook, and doesn’t to this day.
In second grade she was placed in a slow reading class, not knowing about her dyslexia. She was embarrassed, and studied doubly hard, all through school, to overcome her reading challenges.
In fifth grade she was in a forced landing when her father’s aircraft experienced a broken oil line. Her mother proceeded to yell and pound on her back, while her father whistled Dixie and calmly landed the plane on a state highway, pulling smoothly into a gas station to get help. The result was that Betty decided to be cool in the face of danger. Later in life, she stayed calm and quiet as she watched a huge semi-truck bear down on her, while she sat helplessly in the back seat, smelling the burning rubber of the semi’s tires and listening to the squeal of its brakes. Miraculously, the truck missed the car she was in.
In the sixth grade she dreamed regularly in Spanish, but when she awoke she couldn’t speak the language. This resulted in a determination to speak Spanish fluently.
In the seventh grade Betty was told that her choices in life, other than marriage, were being a teacher, a nurse, a secretary or a stewardess. Since her father was a pilot and she had flown from the time she was four, Betty decided to be a stewardess. One criterion for the job was the ability to speak at least two languages. She later flew with Pan American Airlines to 28 countries, after she graduated from college, having majored in Spanish, which she now speaks fluently.
Betty learned another important lesson about telling the truth, the hard way. Her father, the disciplinarian, picked up a phone extension and heard her talking with a friend, who happened to be a boy. When her father asked her who had called, she thoughtlessly gave him the name of a girlfriend. Her father grounded her for 3 months.
She was elected to Girl’s State, became Speaker of the House, learned Parliamentary Procedure and then represented Mississippi at Girl’s nation. The other representative from Mississippi was Jerolyn Ross from Meridian. The two spent a week in Washington, DC, where they met President Eisenhower. While there, Jerolyn was elected President of Girls' Nation and she and Betty returned to a celebratory parade in Jackson. Betty viewed this as a singular accomplishment that enhanced her self-esteem, realizing she could actually attain such an experience.
Beauty pageants in the 1950's in the South were to young women what football was to young men. Betty entered the Miss Jackson pageant that was held the night before she was to leave for summer school at the University of Mexico. She thought if she did not win, she would at least get out of town fast. She became Miss Jackson in 1958 and competed for Miss Mississippi against Mary Ann Mobley, who became Miss America that same year. Though more than disappointed at the time, she is now very grateful not to have won. She can imagine how different her life might have been.
In her Freshman year at college she told her father, if she kept getting straight A’s she would graduate Phi Beta Kappa. She had to explain to him what that meant. He promptly told all his friends and family that she was going to graduate Phi Beta Kappa, so she felt she had to. Despite her dyslexia, she did just that.
While a stewardess Betty had a run-in with a famous airline captain, who thought she was mocking him when she went into the cabin to introduce herself, speaking in the slow drawl of a Southern lady. He told her to cut out the accent or get back in the galley. She was distraught and embarrassed and decided to learn to speak without an accent so that no one would be able to guess she was from the South. Her self-esteem was injured, but then enhanced by learning from the experience.
She got married at 23 to a hardworking, handsome man, which ended her Pan American career. He was an MD. She did not know the most important criteria for a good marriage--having goals, activities and “likes” in common with one’s husband. Her marriage ultimately failed, but not before she decided to have two boys and proceeded to do just that. She attributed her results to the power of thoughts and personal decisions.
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| Model Head Sheet from La Belle |
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At 25 Betty took a big risk and opened her own business with $2,000, at a time when there were few women in business and she had never taken a business course or had any experience. She succeeded for 27 years in teaching self-esteem and modeling and representing a broad range of models and talent, many of whom became very successful.
Early on, she told a young model, who had decided to leave her agency, that she should stay because someday La Belle would represent models all over the world. She realized after she said it that keeping her word would be a very tall order. Ultimately she had former students modeling in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Milan, Spain, Germany and Japan. Yet, she learned the lesson of being careful what you state.
Betty broke her leg severely while skiing on a day that had started terribly and just got worse. She learned, after being in a cast for six months, to pay attention to negative signs and to act more on her intuition.
The decision to divorce her husband of 20 years was the most difficult thing she had ever done, but also turned into the best thing. Before she re-married she interviewed her prospective mate on every date to find out everything she could about him before she agreed to marry him. The result is that she has been happily married for 28 years to a man with whom she has a great deal in common, and who she loves, respects and admires.
At 46 she attended the first Self-Esteem Conference in St. Louis, Mo, which was a life-changing event for her. It gave a name to the curriculum she had been teaching for over 20 years. She met and got to know leaders in the self-esteem movement, such as Nathaniel Brandon, Jack Canfield, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Robert Reasoner and many others. In 1991 and 1992 she was elected President of the National Association for Self-Esteem and was made an advisor to the International Council.
At the age of 53 she was elected President of the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce. It was an honor that gave her the confidence to serve on many other boards, such as Cottage Health Systems, City Commerce Bank and others.
At 55, her husband, who was involved in a stressful career as the Managing Partner of a large and successful law firm, developed cancer and they both began a regimen of meditation and yoga. Eighteen years later, she and her husband, Stan, are still meditating and practicing Ashtanga yoga for an hour twice a week. Stan remains cancer free.
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| Betty and Stan Hatch |
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Betty decided to place her La Belle curriculum and her life stories that dealt with self-esteem on the La Belle Foundation website: www.selfesteem.org in the later part of the1990’s. The result is an average of 1.5 to 2 million hits per year by people through out the world seeking a greater understanding of self-esteem.
Ten years ago she decided to be a human “being” rather than a human “doing”. She started a walking group, having lunch with friends on a regular basis, and even reading during the day! She also became a Hospice volunteer. Betty quoted Albert Schweitzer who said, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but I know: the only ones of you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”
In 2003 Betty decided she did not want her country to be involved in a pre-emptive war and created a Women’s Peace Walk, which attracted some 450 women, who walked silently, wearing white while carrying white silk flags with one word scripted in gold, “Peace,” through downtown Santa Barbara. When the invasion occurred anyway, she was depressed for several months. Now, she is very grateful to have taken this symbolic action.
She ended her talk with: “No one can raise our self-esteem for us. We must want to raise it enough to change what we don’t like about ourselves or be able to accept and love ourselves as we are.”
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